Hi,

This is my dominant electric yellow, he has recently developed strong silver/blue markings around his mouth that i have never seen before. Have these occured due to died/hierachy/food?

this has caused much debate in the past, some say it's a poorly breed fish or a bad quality fish. is he always like this? i think it could be diet, mood or stress but how we actually find out what it is i am not sure.

I would say poorly bred for that fish, the black markings along the bottom of the body look like this too.. Some fish get like this when they get older which is why you have to grow fish out for a number of years before you can determine if you have good stock.

I have found diet related blackness tends to be random spots around the fish but it can cause blackness in these areas as well, what are you feeding?

'poor breeding' as determined by a fish that when found (be it rare) in the lake looks any thing but yellow.

The colours there look perfectly fine to me. They are not picture perfect like what firenzenz has but masking is fairly common in dominant males. You will find that the masking magically vanishes if the fish is not part of a colony.

There is an article by Konings but you have to pay USD4 to get access to it.
http://www.cichlidae.com/article.php?id=188

more articles -
http://www.sydneycichlid.com/electric-yellow.htm
http://www.cichlid-forum.com/articles/l_caeruleus.php

I would regard poor breeding as a yellow that has black marking anywhere regardless of mood, none of mine exhibit any black markings when dominant or breeding and neither do firenz as evident by the photos of his spawning. I will admit it is a nice looking yellow alot better than heaps I have seen out there but for a purist it is not 100%. That is just my opinion

There is a good article here on them..
http://www.cichlid-forum.com/articles/l_caeruleus.php

Yes it doe appear they all originated from a very small population (probably like alot of the fish we have in NZ) so are all inbred but it is very evident from what we see around the place that you do have to select the best from each batch as they there are clean ones around.

Just for comparison there is a terrible pic of my yellows male on the left holding female on the right, male usually has more black on his fins but the flash seemed to wash it out..
http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f183/ ... ellows.jpg

So a slight reversion towards its natural colour makes it "poorly bred"? I guess if you're after a pure yellow fish as has been selectively bred then fair enough...

also known as the blue streak hap
cauruleus means blue or bluish

iirc there were very few "electric yellows" actually in the lake, like 100 only. Lab caruleus is actually a faint blue colour in the lake in vast numbers. a small number of the electric yellows were taken from malawi & bred in ponds or pools near tanganyika which created confusion when several thousand were breed & released into the pet trade as they initially thought they were a tang. they are now the most commonly kept african in the world.

i don't believe that occasional shading or barring fish are poorly bred or of less quality as mine used to show shading & barring at times. does this fish change it's shading etc from time to time?

caruleus means blue I believe they were named this because the first ones identified were actually all blue like these ones.. http://www.cichlid-forum.com/profiles/s ... hp?id=1667 as you can see this is different to having black barring.

It all depends what you want to regard it as. To me an electric yellow should be all yellow with only black on its fins and maybe an eye stripe when excited, that is what I regard a nice clean quality electric yellow and the only fish I will breed from. I gauge this from what I like and what I have seen on reputable sites or winning competitions etc.. Others have different opinions on what they like or accept and this is part of the parcel of anything I guess. Shading or barring with mood does seem to happen as does the black on the belly (but I haven't seen this come and go).

a win on the day can all be in the eye or mind of the judge

the yellows i had didn't get the balck marking ever, just a faint 5 o'clock shadow three or four times in the 3 years i had them.

Yeah your yellows are what I would regard as nice quality fish. What is the saying? Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder..